How to Monitor What Customers are Saying About Your Bar or Restaurant with Free Tools

How to Monitor What Customers are Saying About Your Bar or Restaurant with Free Tools

How to Monitor What Customers are Saying About Your Bar or Restaurant with Free Tools2013-08-282013-08-28http://www.buzztime.com/business/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/logo_medium1.pngBuzztimehttp://www.buzztime.com/business/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/bigstock-Thumb-Up-And-Thumb-Down-Button-30333305.jpg200px200px

Things have changed dramatically for restaurant owners with the explosion of social media and online review sites in the last couple of years. Today, a one-star review on a popular review site can reduce your revenue by 10%. This makes it extremely important for restaurant and bar owners to monitor customer’s feedback, reviews and comments. By monitoring what customers are saying about your business, you can act immediately to resolve a complaint or negative review.

Monitoring tools like Google Alerts and SocialMention are easy to set up and will alert you any time your establishment has been mentioned.

How to set up a Google Alert

Setting up a Google Alert will ensure you never miss when someone mentions your bar or restaurant online.

Google Alerts works by scanning the internet of the keywords or phrases you want monitored, then notifiying you when something is found.

2. Fill out the form starting with your “Search Query” this will be the keyword or phrase you’d like Google Alerts to monitor for you. We recommend starting with your restaurant name. “Use quotes” around the name if it has more than one word. The quotes tell Google to find exactly that phrase. Otherwise, it returns all instances of all the words, regardless of where they appear on the page.

3. Set the result type to “Everything”

4. Choose how often you’d like to receive the alerts: once a day, as it happens, or once a week.

5. Set how many to “All Results”

6. Enter your email address

7. Click “Create Alert” to save your alert.

You can set up multiple searches for Google Alerts to monitor. Repeat the above process for each keyword or phrase.

How to set up a SocialMention Alert

Social Mention will specifically monitor mentions of your bar or restaurant on social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and several others.

2. Enter your keyword or phrase into the search bar. “Use quotes” around the name if it has more than one word.

3. The drop down menu will ask you about the social media platforms you want to monitor. It is best to select “All” for better results and greater coverage.

4. Click “Search”

5. SocialMention will search the social networks for any mentions – it could take a few seconds or minutes for the results of the search to show up.

6. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click “Alert.” From here you will be able to save your search and include an email address for the alerts to be sent to.

7. Social Mention will immediately send you a verification alert to your given email. After receiving and clicking on the verification link mentioned in the email, you will start receiving daily alerts whenever someone talks about your bar or restaurant on social media sites.

SocialMention and Google Alerts are both very powerful (and FREE) tools to monitor feedback and online reviews. Be sure to set up alerts for your bar or restaurant so you’re first to hear what customers are saying!

Trusted by thousands of bars and restaurants in North America since 1984, Buzztime integrates trivia, card, sports games and live events with innovative tablet technology. While we don't take ourselves too seriously, this is pretty serious business.